Broadway & Me

I'm a theater lover. I am happiest when I am sitting in a theater. Or talking about theater. Or reading about theater. Or now blogging about it. If you’re reading this, you're probably a theater lover too and I hope you’ll keep me company as I blog my way through each Broadway season.

August 11, 2018

There's no post today because I'm taking time off to celebrate my birthday this weekend. The celebrations include a repeat visit to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child with my theatergoing buddy Bill (click here to read my earlier review) hanging out with my sister and nieces, hearing jazz and enjoying a fancy dinner with my beloved husband K. But I'll be back next week, a year older but still crazy about theater and eager to share what I've seen and think about it with you guys.

August 4, 2018

Maybe there were too many top chefs in the room when they
were cooking up This Ain't No Disco, the rock musical that recently opened
at the Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater. Cause the show, which
purports to tell the potentially juicy stories of a group of fictional and non-fictional
people associated with the dance club Studio 54 at the height of its fame in
the late '70s, has turned out to be a big bowl of mush.

Few shows started off with more advantages. The rock score
is by Stephen Trask, who composed the foot-stomping music and witty lyrics for Hedwig
and the Angry Inch; and Peter Yanowitz, the drummer for the Grammy
Award-winning rock band The Wallflowers. These guys clearly know their way around
rock music and some of This Ain't No Disco's tunes are catchy but the overall
score lacks cohesion and there's no great dance anthem, which a show like this
one obviously should have.

Similarly, I expected much from Rick Elice, the co-writer of
the Tony-nominated book for Jersey Boys, who collaborated with Trask and
Yanowitz on the book for this show. But their narrative totally fails to deliver. Its dialog, delivered in rhyming couplets, isn't nearly as clever as it wants to be.

The multiple storylines are convoluted and ultimately make no sense. A scene in which two coatroom staffers fantasize about the lives of the rich and famous who frequent the club is a perfect setup for exploring the obsession with celebrity culture that seems to be the show's underlying message but that plot line abruptly veers in another direction.

And the characters—be they the fictional gay
hustler who enjoys 15 minutes of fame as a graffitti artist and the single mom who
becomes a coked-up disco diva, or the real-life Steve Rubell who managed Studio 54 and club regular Andy Warhol who is coyly referred to only as The Artist—are so sketchy that it's hard
to invest in what happens to any of them.

But most disappointing of all is the direction by Darko
Tresnjak, whose pitch-perfect staging of A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder
deservedly won him the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Tony Awards four
years ago. Tresnjak says he had an unusually short period of time to work
on this production (click here to read an interview with him) and more time was clearly needed because this is a lackluster re-creation of the flamboyantly colorful disco era.

The director does have scantily-clad male disco dancers gyrating
around the stage but they seem sleazy rather than glamorous or the naughty fun
that Studio 54 was famous for. And Tresnjak is even more at a loss when the
action briefly shifts to the intentional grittiness of the downtown punk-rock haven the
Mudd Club (click here to read more about it).

The attempts at cinematic staging are clunky. The
choreography is flatfooted.There's a whiff of desperation as actors run
around the stage and into the audience. The jungle-gym style set conveys
little of the flavor of either dance club and does no favor to audience members sitting on the sides.

The
costumes are OK. But the lighting and sound definitely are not. The diva was almost through
her big second-act ballad before I could find where she was onstage, which is what good lighting is
supposed to show me.

The Playbill says that the first-time sound designer is a master
engineer who has mixed thousands of recordings for everyone from David Bowie to
Vampire Weekend. But a show is different from a recording and it's often hard to
understand what Disco's actors are saying, crucial in a show that is mostly sung
through.

The diverse and largely young cast is energetic but uneven. There's a
lot of mugging and Theo Stockman gnaws straight through the scenery as Rubell. However Will
Connolly does manage to bring a droll restraint to his portrayal of The Artist (I'm
guessing the Warhol estate denied the use of his name but couldn't do anything about the trademark white wig).

Faring best is Chilina Kennedy, who
has spent the last three years appearing as Carole King in Beautiful and brings a sense of professionalism and some much needed humor to the role of a self-promoting publicist.

Steve Rubell, who died in 1989,and his partner Ian Schrager, still alive and
so not mentioned in the show, threw a final party at Studio 54 in 1980 and then
went off to serve a year in jail for tax evasion, which is where this staged
version of their tale ends.

The real Studio 54 venue went on to become one of the theaters owned by the Roundabout Theater Company. I've seen many great performances there since the company took up residence in 1998 and I'm looking forward to seeing Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones and Daniel Radcliffe there in The Lifespan of a Fact this fall and then
in the spring the much anticipated revival of Kiss Me Kate with Will Chase and
Kelli O'Hara.

I was living in San Francisco during disco's heyday and
I only got past the old Studio 54's velvet rope once during a vacation home. I
have to confess that I wasn't as impressed as I thought I would be (although I
did get a small kick out of seeing Calvin Klein and Liza Minnelli) but even that was more
entertaining than This Ain't No Disco, which, alas, simply ain't much fun.

July 28, 2018

What a difference a director can make. The first time I saw
the dark comedy Straight White Men, it was directed by its playwright Young
Jean Lee for a 2014 workshop production at the Public Theater and although
Lee is a longtime downtown darling revered for her audaciousness, the result was
dour and off-putting. But the new Second Stage production that opened this week
at the company's Helen Hayes Theater under the vibrant direction of Anna D.
Shapiro gave me an evening in the theater that was both thought-provoking and entertaining.

Lee, who with this production becomes the first
Asian-American woman to have a play open on Broadway, is known for her deep
dives into questions of race and gender (click here to read a great profile of her). She usually comes at these issues from the perspective of the oppressed. Her
breakout piece The Shipment took on contemporary stereotypes about black people. Another one Untitled
Feminist Show upended the ways in which women's bodies are stigmatized by featuring six nude performers
ranging in size from petite to obese.

So it's clear that Lee is making a provocative statement
just by turning her gaze on the hetero cis-gendered white guys who give her
play its title. The four in Straight White Men are Ed, a widowed father in his
70s, and his three grown sons Matt, Jake and Drew who have gathered to
celebrate Christmas.

The baby of the family Drew is a tenured professor and an
award-winning novelist who flits from woman to woman. Middle brother Jake is a high-powered banker and recently divorced. But the eldest Matt has moved back in with their dad, works at a temp job, hasn’t dated in years and, despite his protestations that all is well, breaks
into tears as they eat a Christmas Eve dinner of Chinese takeout.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around Matt's siblings’ bungling
attempts to understand and cure his sadness. Lee has added a framing device and
two new characters for this Broadway production. They are called the Persons in
Charge and are played by the gender fluid performers Kate Bornstein and Ty
Defoe who roam the audience before the show starts, introduce it with some TED
Talk-style patter and then literally position the actors in place before each
scene begins.

I think these gender-defying masters of ceremonies are supposed
to symbolize the fact that our concept of masculinity is in flux but they seem
redundant because when done right, as it's done here, Straight White Men makes
that point on its own.

The play goes out of its way to establish that these guys
are aware of the privilege that their race and gender give them. Drew solicitously suggests that Matt might be struggling with coming out. Jake's
ex-wife is a black woman and his kids are mixed-race. In the first scene the two of them play a modified version of the board game Monopoly called Privilege in which the
player who draws a white card has to pay a $200 penalty and go to jail.

And yet, in ways large (Jake mentors only whites at his
bank) and small (the brothers communicate best when they manhandle one another)
Straight White Men makes it clear that these men find it hard to break out of
the roles that society has set for them. Which is why they're so
horrified by Matt's feminine behavior: taking care of their dad, working a
low-paying job, crying.

In short, it's a hard-eyed look at how men oppress
themselves. But Shapiro keeps the play from being tendentious or tedious by
emphasizing the genuine affection these men feel for one another and their
earnest desire to be better than they are. This choice not to portray them as villains is an audacious act of compassion for liberal theatermakers to make in the current political climate.

Shapiro also doesn't shy away from using the innate charms of
her actors. Lots of people are turning out to see the show because Drew is played by the movie
star and avatar for today's straight white man Armie Hammer (click here for a very long profile about him) or because they liked the actors playing his
siblings, Josh Charles and Paul Schneider, in their roles on the TV shows
"The Good Wife" and "Parks and Recreation."

Under Shapiro's steady hand, all three actors appear totally
comfortable onstage and deliver performances that go far beyond cameo status. But
the biggest test to her mettle may have been the cast changes that occurred over
the past few weeks when Tom Skerritt bowed out of playing Ed during rehearsals and was replaced
by Denis Arndt, who bowed out during previews (click here to read about all of that).

Shapiro finally tapped the show's understudy Stephen Payne
to play Ed. Payne isn't a name like his co-stars but he is additional proof that this director really knows what her play needs.

July 21, 2018

It's summer vacation time and tourists, who account for over
60 percent of Broadway's ticket buyers, have been streaming into the city,
eager to see shows ranging from tried-and-true war horses like Wicked and The Phantom of the Opera to newly Tony-minted hits Harry
Potter and the Cursed Child and The Band's Visit. I'm happy
for those theatergoers but I wish there was something else for them to see,
something like a museum dedicated to Broadway.

My wistfulness isn't new. I've been yearning for such a
place for years. But that longing intensified with a recent visit to Cooperstown,
New York, where my husband K and I spent a full day at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and
Museum. I'm not much of a sports fan but by the time I made my way through all
three floors of memorabilia and over 100 years of the sport's history, I found
myself really wanting to see a ballgame and totally envious that a similar place
doesn't exist for theater.

Now there are places in New York where you can find exhibits
about Broadway history. Both the Museum of the City of New York and the New-York
Historical Society have theatrical treasures in their collections and they occasionally
display some of them, such as the museum did with its terrific survey of
Yiddish theater in 2016 and the Historical Society with its tribute to the legendary
theatrical cartoonist Al Hirschfeld in 2015.

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts offers an
even more steady diet of theater-related exhibits. The one it did on Noel
Coward in 2012 was one of the most informative and entertaining museum shows of
any kind I've ever seen. The Library's currently hosting a small tribute to Richard Rodgers
and Oscar Hammerstein that will be on view through Sept. 25.

But none of these venues are in the Theater District so only
the most determined tourists are likely to seek out their shows. The one geographical
exception is the American Theatre Hall of Fame, which makes its home at the
Gershwin Theatre, where Wicked has been playing for the past 15
years.

Founded in 1972 to honor the careers of significant theater
professionals, the hall's members include actors like Audra McDonald and
playwrights like Tina Howe, as well as producers like Daryl Roth and even theater
critics like Ernie Schier, aco-founder
and the first chairman of the American Theater Critics Association (of which I'm a proud new member).

All of those folks in the previous paragraph were inducted into the Hall of
Fame last fall and their names are now inscribed alongside past honorees on the
walls of the Gershwin. I’m told that a collection of memorabilia from past winners is
assembled there too. But my guess is that only the most die-hard theater fans
even know that any of it is there. And most of them can't see those displays
even if they know of their existence because the space is only accessible to people paying to see Wicked.

What the names on the wall and the artifacts on display need
is a place of their own where Broadway and its history can be widely
appreciated. The space doesn't have to be as big as the one baseball has in
Cooperstown but it shouldn't be a cheesy throwaway either. The best museums
today are interactive affairs that offer visitors a variety of ways to interact
with the subject they're celebrating.

Wouldn't it be great if some of the crowds roaming through
Times Square had a nearby place to go where they could see the costumes Patti
LuPone and Laura Benanti wore in Gypsy, hear songs that were cut
from the original production of In the Heights, see drafts of the
script for A Raisin in the Sun or learn about the achievements of
the names on that Hall of Fame wall?

A reasonable admission fee could make it enticing for even a
casual theatergoer. Docents from all parts of the theater community could share
their enthusiasm for live theater. And Broadway performers might even pop in
every now and then to add extra excitement. Heads snapped around when the
recently-retired outfielder Carlos Beltrán walked through one of the galleries
the day K and I were at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I'm willing to bet that a conveniently located museum that
offered a truly visceral sense of Broadway (after all, who can put on a better
show than Broadway folks) would have a lot of its attendees leaving the same way
I left the baseball museum: dying to see the real thing.

July 14, 2018

Edward Bond's drama Saved shocked London audiences in 1965 with its depiction of a group of disaffected young people
stoning a baby to death. That harrowing scene set the bar for generations of British playwrights determined to show that they too were mad as hell at the world—
and daring enough to say so. Thus, we've had racism, rape and torture in Sarah
Kane's Blasted, maiming and matricide in Martin McDonagh's A Behanding in
Spokane and The Beauty Queen of Leenane, nihilism and murder in Simon Stephen's
Punk Rock, and now the multiple atrocities committed in David Ireland's Cyprus
Avenue, a co-production of Dublin's Abbey Theatre and London’s Royal Court Theatre that is scheduled to finish up its run at The Public Theater
on July 29.

Directed by the Royal Court's artistic director Vicky
Featherstone, Cyprus Avenue chronicles the disintegration of a middle-aged guy named Eric, who was born and bred in Northern Ireland but defiantly identifies as
British and harbors a hatred of the IRA so deep that it
distorts every interaction he has, including those with the members of his immediate
family.

I gasped right along with everyone else in the audience as
Eric committed one horrific act after another. And the great actor Stephen Rea's characteristically
committed portrayal of Eric had me straining to
understand how such a seeming everyman could end up so tragically wrong.

But I also left the theater feeling a bit queasy, partially because
of the production's somewhat graphic violence but even more so because of my
tacit complicity in accepting it as entertainment.

Let's face it, after 60
years of this kind of shock and awe, few new insights are being offered up. Instead, what we get is just the stage version of a slasher film masquerading as black
comedy (and why do we continue to regard killing people as a laughing matter?) or absurdist commentary.

We're supposed to see this play as a cautionary tale about what
happens whenfundamentalist beliefs go
too far. But Eric is presented as so deeply delusional (he actually uses a magic
marker to draw a beard on the face of his infant granddaughter) that there's no
real connection between his story and those of the real-life people who commit terrifying acts.

Cyprus Avenue unfolds in a series of Eric's conversations with his therapist, a Nigerian-British woman whom he
calls a nigger. I know; I flinched at the word just as you probably did when you read it. And the comment is totally gratuitous, adding nothing to our understanding of what drives some people to hate. It's
just there, like this play is, to say "look how daring I am."